From Shared Enaction to Intrinsic Value. How Enactivism Contributes to Environmental Ethics

Abstract

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its "intrinsicality" does not boil down to being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we call shared enaction of an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher.

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

“…Without necessarily addressing all of these issues, several researchers have found affinities between enactive ideas and a variety of questions in ethics (Candiotto and De Jaegher 2021;Colombetti and Torrance 2009;Cuffari 2014;De Jaegher 2021;DeSouza 2013;Di Paolo et al 2018;Dierckxsens 2020;Gallagher 2020;Loaiza 2019;Métais and Villalobos 2021;Thompson 2001;Urban 2014Urban , 2015van Grunsven 2018;Varela 1999;Varela et al 1991;Werner and Kiełkowicz-Werner 2021). Enaction is a particular kind of nonreductive naturalism, one that stresses the continuities but also the innovations that occur between natural processes, life, mind, language, and human communities; as much an approach to embodied minds as a rethinking of nature.…”

Addiction, cure or care?

“…This account finds its cradle in the Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science (EECS) (Gallagher, 2020;Di Paolo, Cuffari and De Jaegher, 2018;Newen, De Bruin and Gallagher, 2018;Hutto and Myin, 2017;Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 2016), which are tightly aligned with naturalism (Overgaard et al 2017;Meacham, 2013 Zahavi, 2010), even if this requires us to re-think the concept of nature to secure non-reductionist cognitive science (Gallagher, 2018). EECS is especially relevant in the context of this paper for its recent work on care ethics (Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2021;Werner andKiełkowicz-Werner, 2021) andethical inclusion (van Es andBervoets, 2021;Hipólito, Hutto and Chown, 2020). The brain disease model, while reductionist, has been very important to understand addiction and fundamental for the insights it can provide; therefore, the reader should not be surprised that we leverage biological evidence to support our thesis.…”

De-Humanizing Cognition, Intelligence, and Agency. A Critical Assessment Between Philosophy, Ethics, and Science

“…(b) In support of the relevance of enactivism for this discourse, it is possible to say that if scientific findings from ethology are relevant for questions of animal ethics (Würbel 2009), and empirical data from ecology and systems theory are admissible for questions of environmental ethics (Dicks 2017), why should enactivist considerations about the nature of human and animal agents not be admissible? Furthermore, on the metaethical side (a), if it is accepted in the literature that the enactivist framework allows for rethinking the moral question by redefining the relationship of the human agent and the process of value attribution (Werner, Kiełkowicz-Werner 2022), why should this not apply to the field of animal and environmental ethics?…”